Fukushima and the Battle for Truth
Large sectors of the Japanese population
are accumulating significant levels
of internal contamination
By Paul Zimmerman
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26798
Global Research, September 27, 2011
Fukushima’s
nuclear disaster is a nightmare. Ghostly releases of radioactivity
haunt the Japanese countryside. Lives, once safe, are now beset by an
ineffable scourge promising vile illness and death.
Large sectors of the population are accumulating significant levels of internal contamination, setting the stage for a public health tragedy.
A subtle increase in the number of miscarriages and fetal deaths will be the first manifestation that something is amiss. An elevated incidence of birth defects will begin in the Fall and continue into the indefinite future. Thyroid diseases, cardiac diseases and elevated rates of infant and childhood leukemia will follow. Over the next decade and beyond, cancer rates will soar.
Large sectors of the population are accumulating significant levels of internal contamination, setting the stage for a public health tragedy.
A subtle increase in the number of miscarriages and fetal deaths will be the first manifestation that something is amiss. An elevated incidence of birth defects will begin in the Fall and continue into the indefinite future. Thyroid diseases, cardiac diseases and elevated rates of infant and childhood leukemia will follow. Over the next decade and beyond, cancer rates will soar.
Chernobyl
was the harbinger of this heartbreaking scenario. It taught mankind the
inescapable biological truths that emerge within populations internally
contaminated by heightened levels of fission products. And yet,
government and industry schemers attack these truths as unfounded
scare-mongering. With cold indifference, they deny that Chernobyl was a
mass casualty event. They turn a blind eye to a huge body of research
and deviously proclaim that no evidence exists that more than a handful
of people suffered harm from the Ukrainian disaster. They publish
propaganda, draped in the guise of science, that dismisses the hazard of
low levels of internal contamination. Believing their subterfuge to
have been successful and intoxicated by their hubris, they are already
positioning themselves to stage-manage the public’s perception of
Fukushima.
Japan’s
government, its Nuclear Safety Commission, and the Tokyo Electric
Power Company have already demonstrated that they will do everything in
their power to keep citizens ignorant of what is taking place. The
emerging health crisis is scheduled to be erased. Following a
time-tested blueprint worked out by prior radiation releases around the
world, data relevant to assessing the medical impact of the accident
will not be gathered. Radiation doses to the population will be woefully
underestimated. The hazards associated with low levels of internal
contamination will be obliterated from all discussions of risk. Academic
journals that support the nuclear agenda will be flooded with bogus
studies demonstrating that no health detriment was suffered by the
population. The heightened incidence of childhood leukemia will be
attributed to some as yet unidentified virus unleashed by population
mixing following the evacuations caused by the tsunami. (This theory is
currently in vogue to deny that the heightened incidence of leukemia
among children under five years of age living nearby to nuclear reactors
is radiation induced.) The birth defects will be summarily dismissed
as impossible because the risk models upheld by the International
Commission on Radiological Protection don’t predict them. The
possibility that the models are fraudulently constructed escapes
consideration. (See a Betrayal of Mankind by the Radiation Protection Agencies, available as a free download at http://www.du-deceptions.com/excerpts.html.)
How
is TRUTH to gain ascendancy when blocked by this institutionalized
matrix of deceit? What agency can possibly take the lead to accurately
document the full scope of the disaster, identify its victims and those
at risk, and publish trustworthy public health information? Who is going
to take responsibility to protect the children? To wait for the
government to come to the rescue is naive. The history of radiation
accidents testifies that governments routinely betray their citizens in
deference to their nuclear weapons program and the nuclear industry. No,
only one alternative is open to the people of Japan. They must become
proactive. They must seize the initiative and wrest control from
government and industry of the “perception” of the catastrophe.
The
accident at Fukushima demands that a peoples’ campaign be initiated to
produce an honest assessment of the current situation, catalog the
medical consequences as they emerge, and offer accurate advice as to how
citizens can protect themselves. Using the internet as a platform,
scientists from all relevant disciplines must band together with
interested laypeople with something valid to contribute to create a
widely distributed open source research project. The evolving online
encyclopedia will archive all pertinent data and preserve it from future
tampering. The accident from its inception must be documented. With
published reports frequently in conflict with one another, all available
information, whether from government sources, citizen investigators or
eyewitnesses, must be gathered for future evaluation. Worldwide
meteorological data since March 11 must be assembled. All official and
unofficial measurements of radiation in the environment, both in Japan
and worldwide, must be collected and collated. This is essential
information required for future epidemiological studies. Contaminated
agricultural areas must be identified. Samples of all edible material
for human and animal consumption must be evaluated for safety. As
suspected radiation-induced illness begins to appear in the population,
healthcare providers and victims must make public their experiences.
Initially, this information will be anecdotal but nonetheless
invaluable. It will identify emerging trends of morbidity and mortality
and define population subgroups requiring more systematic scientific
investigation. Researchers working alone or in groups must seize the
initiative to pursue study in their fields of expertise and interest.
(One excellent suggestion by Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition
for Nuclear Responsibility is the widespread collection of babies’ teeth
to provide objective data on the geographic dispersion and uptake of
strontium-90 [1].) Methodologies, data and results need be posted online
as they become available. Free access to the whole body of work must be guaranteed so as to allow scrutiny
by people from all over the world. Transparency must be paramount. An
open dialogue will allow divergent points of view to be fairly
represented. Disagreements over research protocols or the interpretation
of results will point the way to new avenues of investigation where
clarification and consensus might be achieved. Objective investigation
via the scientific method will be the final arbitrator of truth. The
ultimate goal of this effort will be to produce an unbiased
determination of the public health consequences of radiation released
into the environment, assess the accuracy of current standards of
radiation safety and identify how improvements can be made for the
common welfare of humanity.
It
is urgent that this initiative commence immediately. Data must be
captured while it is remains untainted. Of particular importance is the
securing of pre-accident health statistics for the population of Japan.
Rates for various pregnancy outcomes; the frequency of different types
of birth defects; the incidence of thyroid diseases, heart diseases,
cancers and so forth, all must be cataloged. There is good reason why
this baseline data need be preserved. The history of radiation accidents
is littered with examples of the outright falsification of data that
has prevented an honest evaluation of the effects of low levels of
internal contamination on human health. For instance, evidence exists
that morbidity and mortality data published by the U.S. Government’s
Public Health Service was altered in the wake of radiation releases from
nuclear weapon production facilities and commercial nuclear power
plants so as to hide cancer deaths in the population [2]. The accident
at Three Mile Island, persistently painted by government and industry
spokesmen as a benign event, in fact produced illness and death among
humans and farm animals downwind [3,4]. After the accident at Chernobyl,
hundreds of thousands of so-called “liquidators” participated in
cleanup operations in close proximity to the destroyed reactor and also
built a concrete sarcophagus around the reactor building to entomb the
radiation. According to the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR),
in subsequent years this population was reported as having a lower rate
of leukemia than the general population. Only later did it come to
light that Soviet doctors were forbidden from recording leukemia in
their diagnoses [5]. The Wales Cancer Registry was cited by the ECRR as
excising cases of cancer from its database so as to prevent the
Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing facility in the U.K. from being
blamed for causing illness to the population. Also mentioned by ECRR was
the alteration of infant mortality figures in Germany after Chernobyl
so as to mask the impact of the accident on public health [5].
Mischief
has not been confined to falsifying health records. In 1957, a fire
broke out in the graphite reactor at Windscale, England on the site now
occupied by the Sellafield facility. The amount of radiation released
and the incidence of cancer induced in the population of Ireland has
remained fiercely contentious issues. According to the ECRR, at some
point after the fire, meteorological records were altered “with the
apparent motive of concealing the likely location of any effects” [5].
Similarly, the Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor in Tsuruga, Japan
suffered a devastating fire in 1995. Prefecture and city officials found
that the operator had tampered with video images of the fire to hide
the scale of the disaster [6].
If an accurate documentation of the health consequences of Fukushima is to succeed, one condition is paramount: the project MUST
retain its independence from the international agencies that currently
dominate the discussion of radiation effects. The tacit mandate of these
organizations is to support nuclear weapons programs and the nuclear
industry, and they do so by publishing fraudulent scientific studies
that downplay the hazards to health of radioactive material released
into the environment. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO),
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations
Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) and
other UN organizations jointly published Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-economic Impacts
[7]. This study is routinely cited as proof that Chernobyl had little
impact on public health. It concluded that only twenty-eight first
responders died from acute radiation syndrome and 4,000 children
developed thyroid cancer, fifteen of whom died by 2002. In addition, it estimated that an additional 4,000 fatal cancers might
arise in the overall population. This sanitized version of the
catastrophe was reached by the devious method of consulting only 350
sources of information, mostly published in English, while ignoring
30,000 publications and 170,000 sources of information available in
languages other than English [8]. A summary of this large body of
literature, published as Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and Nature, concluded that radiation-induced casualties approached 980,000 [9].
To
offer a second example, a number of prestigious institutions have
published disinformation on the hazards to health of depleted uranium
weapons. These include WHO, IAEA, the European Commission, the Royal
Society in the U.K., the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease
Registry in the U.S., the Rand Corporation, and the Health Physics
Society [10,11,12,13,14,15,16]. All concluded that weaponized uranium
creates no adverse health effects when internalized by soldiers on the
battlefield and downwind populations. Justification for this conclusion
came from a survey of the scientific literature regarding uranium
contamination among workers in the uranium and nuclear industries and
populations exposed to elevated levels of uranium in their drinking
water. Historically, the only two types of adverse health effects
documented among these populations is altered kidney function due to
uranium’s chemical toxicity and cancer due to uranium’s radioactivity.
But studies of veterans suffering from Gulf War Syndrome reveals no
evidence of kidney disease. And according to models promulgated by the
International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), the
radiation dose from battlefield uranium is too low to initiate cancer.
The conclusion? Case closed! DU cannot be a factor in the severe
suffering of veterans or the increased incidence of cancer and birth
defects in Fallujah and other areas of Iraq. As convincing as the logic
of these studies attempt to be, they all suffer from fatal flaws. They
all fail to acknowledge that combustion-derived micro- and nano-sized
particles of uranium have unique biokinetics when internalized that are
not comparable to historical types of uranium exposure, and they quit
cleverly fail to take into account the most up-to-date research on the
toxicology of uranium. New research conducted since the first Gulf War
has demonstrated that uranium is genotoxic (capable of damaging DNA),
cytotoxic (poisonous to cells), mutagenic (capable of inducing
mutations), teratogenic (capable of interfering with normal embryonic
development) and neurotoxic (capable of harming nerve tissue). This
research has yet to dislodge the stale mantra that uranium is only
capable of causing kidney disease and cancer. (For a thorough disclosure
of the fraudulent science used to discount the hazards of DU and a
summary of recent research on the toxicology of uranium, see this
author’s “The Harlot of Babylon Unmasked: Fraudulent Science and the
Cover-Up of the Health Effects of Depleted Uranium” in A Primer in the Art of Deception available at
http://www.du-deceptions.com/ [17]. )
Mischief
also infects the radiation protection community. The Radiation Effects
Research Foundation in Hiroshima conducts ongoing medical research on
the health of the survivors of the atomic bombings at the end of WWII.
The Life Span Study is the single most important piece of evidence used
by the ICRP for setting worldwide guidelines for radiation safety. That
radiation safety for all types of exposure and all manner of
radiation-induced illnesses relies so heavily on this research is
incredibly disturbing because the Life Span Study is deeply and
irreparably flawed. Initiated five years after the bombings, after tens
of thousands of victims succumbed to unidentified levels of radiation
exposure, results are hopelessly skewed in favor of finding radiation
less hazardous than it in fact is. Further, the study can provide no
meaningful information on the birth outcomes to fetuses exposed in utero.
More problematic is the fact that both the study and the control groups
were internally contaminated by the black rain that showered down upon
the destroyed cities after the blasts. This unacknowledged contamination
of the control group hopelessly compromises any meaningful conclusions
of the rates of radiation-induced illnesses in the study group. The Life
Span Study is plagued by numerous other flaws that raise serious
questions as to why it has become the centerpiece of radiation
standards. (For further information on this topic, consult Exhibit C in
the aforementioned free download at http://www.du-deceptions.com/downloads/Betrayal_Chap6.pdf.)
The
Japanese have been victimized by nuclear horror more than any other
people on Earth. Today they are immersed in an imperceptible tragedy
that will slowly but inevitably bring disease and heartbreak to
millions. In response to this crime, a rare and courageous opportunity
exists. By undertaking a national campaign to honestly document the
disaster that is engulfing them, they can lead all of humanity to break
through the quagmire of deception and deceit that has allowed nuclear
weapons and reactors to flourish. Truth finally has an opportunity to
triumph over falsehood. In some small but significant way, this would be
fitting repayment for the malevolence of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and
Fukushima.
Paul Zimmerman is the author of A Primer in the Art of Deception: The Cult of Nuclearists, Uranium Weapons and Fraudulent Science. A
more technical, fully referenced presentation of the fraudulent nature
of current radiation standards and the coverup of the effects of
depleted uranium weapons can be found within its pages. Excerpts, free to download, are available at www.du-deceptions.com.
Notes
[1] Gordon Edwards. Tepco
Confirms the Presence of Radioactive Plutonium and Strontium
Contamination. Email newsletter from Gordon Edwards of the Canadian
Coalition of Nuclear Responsibility (http://www.ccnr.org/). September 4, 2011.
[2] Jay Gould, Benjamin Goldman. Deadly Deceit: Low Level Radiation, High Level Cover-Up. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows; 1990.
[3]
Sue Sturgis. “Fooling with Disaster? Startling Revelations About Three
Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety.” Counterpunch. April 3-5, 2009. http://www.counterpunch.org/sturgis04032009.html
[4] Katagiri Mitsuru, Aileen M. Smith. Three Mile Island: The People’s Testament. (1989), a series of interviews with approximately 250 Three Mile Island (TMI) area residents from 1979 to 1988.
[5] European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR). Recommendations
of the European Committee on Radiation Risk: the Health Effects of
Ionising Radiation Exposure at Low Doses for Radiation Protection
Purposes. Regulators’ Edition. Brussels; 2003. www.euradcom.org.
[6] Hiroko Tabuchi. Japan Strains to Fix a Reactor Damaged Before Quake. New York Times. June 17, 2011.
[7] The Chernobyl Forum. Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental
and Socio-economic Impacts. Austria: International Atomic Energy Agency; April, 2006. http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf
[8] Janette D. Sherman. Chernobyl, 25 Years Later. CounterPunch. March 4-6, 2011. http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/03/04/chernobyl-25-years-later/
[9] A. V. Yablokov, V. B., Nesterenko and A. V. Nesterenko. Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and Nature. The New York Academy of Science. 2009. http://books.google.com/books/about/Chernobyl.html?id=g34tNlYOB3AC
[10] World Health Organization (WHO). Depleted Uranium: Sources, Exposure and Health Effects. Department of Protection of the Human Environment. WHO/SDE/PHE/01.1. Geneva: WHO; 2001.
[11] International Atomic Energy Agency. Features: Depleted Uranium.
[12] European Commission, Directorate General of Environment. Opinion of the Group of Experts Established According to Article 31 of the Euratom Treaty: Depleted Uranium. March 6, 2001.
[13] Royal Society. Health Hazards of Depleted Uranium Munitions: Part I. London: Royal Society, March 2002. http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Royal_Society_Content/policy/publications/2001/10023.pdf
Royal Society. Health Hazards of Depleted Uranium Munitions: Part II. London: Royal Society, March 2002. http://royalsociety.org/policy/publications/2002/health-uranium-munitions-ii/
[14] Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). Toxicological Profile for Uranium. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; 1999.
[15] Naomi H. Harley, Ernest C. Foulkes, Lee H. Hilborne, Arlene Hudson, C.R. Anthony. A Review of the Scientific Literature as it Pertains to Gulf War Illnesses: Volume 7 - Depleted Uranium. Santa Monica: Rand National Defense Research Institute; 1999.
[16] Health Physics Society. http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q746.html
[17] Paul Zimmerman. A Primer in the Art of Deception: The Cult of Nuclearists, Uranium Weapons and Fraudulent Science. 2009. http://www.du-deceptions.com/
